The Writings of Lucas J Burford

What Readers Feel

Sep 7 Puberty at Twenty-Five

It's strange to me that teenagers are looking more like adults in their size and stature, yet if you said pussy fart or something vulgar around a group of teenage boys with essence of experience and age, they'd probably start laughing or go into deep thought of what this fart would sound or smell like. With any age comes this dilemma, you might not look your age, but eventually it's going to become very apparent to those around you. I had a sheltered childhood away from these terms that I later learned in my mid twenties, and now at the age of 32 I can laugh at about anything, even genocide if phrased well enough. I was never the outwardly manly man, I was considered a pretty boy and the bias of that term was appropriate enough for me getting past twenty-five. I can change a tire, but not the oil. I can protect a girl down some shady streets in the city, but to protect her from a giant flying moth around her apartment, good luck and break the lease. I hate being dirty with oil and mud, but in summer I'll be drenched in sweat while I let the subway cake on the cities residue of a million other people sweating and touching everything around me. Puddle of puke on the ground? No problem. Mud puddle without warning, or proper shoes in the country, I'm going straight home and never looking back. It's my masculine preference. If you are rugged as fuck or have beard, this doesn't make you a man.

I know that being a man is hard for some people, especially women. They just don't have it. Take the name and glory, it's a relief for those afraid to be a man and all the baggage it comes with. I once weighed 200 plus pounds working on a farm doing manual labor. Every pound of me was rock solid, I had a shaved head, giant beard, and was covered in dirt. I could lift anything and I couldn't give myself a hug. I worked hard from sun up till sun down ensuring a good harvest and building my work ethic. This could have been portrayed as physical masculinity at it's finest. There was one issue though. The issue, that I later learned is that on farms, there is farm life. This particular farm had no running water or electricity, I won't mention the bathroom, but if you have four plastic walls and blue water, you can shit in it. So after a few weeks of hard labor, I had not taken a bath. I had stood out in the rain, but no real soap and water. Being a heavy smoker at the time, I couldn't smell me, but eventually the owners of the farm made me. So in the kitchen they boiled me a pot of water, gave me that pot, which burned my fingers carrying it in front of me to the "bathroom," which had a a normal tub, surrounded by walls of particle board and I had to hunch over, being taller than the rest. I dumped that boiling pot of water into a larger bucket of room temperature water. Inside that bucket was a ladle and random bugs that flew in and drowned. My sturdy 200lb frame could get past the dead bugs, but where there is water, there is life, giant bristly long legged life. These spiders were harmless, but they looked like skeleton hands covered in brown fur and they were everywhere. I sat down in that tub and poured as much of that hot water around me, trying to shoo off the spiders with small noises and air from my mouth, they didn't budge. I was terrified. I managed to get clean enough and came out of that bathroom running. I won't tell you about the night, or the mosquito net fortress I built to keep out these spiders, but over time I learned to live with all the bugs, spiders, centipedes, and mosquito's easily. I did this by asking the girls of the farm to kill spiders in the open by charming them with my good looks, and by drinking more than I should. This was another masculine preference. No amount of physical strength will prove how manly you are.

It's all shapes and sizes, but masculinity is flawed and judged on strength and sex appeal. There was no difference in masculinity when I weighed fifty pounds less riding on a train through downtown San Francisco in a shirt and tie going to work, compared to my hearty farm work. I was just afraid of spiders in San Francisco, but luckily it was only giant bay rats and mentally unstable homeless. So how do we judge masculinity fairly? We can't, until something requiring that action comes knocking. I remember as a teenager getting into a car accident. I wasn't driving, and it was a day before prom night. It was on a not busy street in Phoenix somewhere and her eyes were on something as she hit the car in front of her. The smell of airbags is something worse than burnt hair. At the moment of impact, the slow motion of my head being jerked and pounded into an airbag, I had a realization of how much of a boy I was, and that was when I only cared about me. Once the ringing in my ears stopped enough for me to focus I didn't ask if she was okay or hurt or even alive. This small instant of harm was thrown at me, and I worried only for myself. In later accidentals involving actual loved ones, I rushed to them first, disregarding any shape I was in. Men were to protect, that was one of their duties as men. You throw your family into the woods with one nasty bear and it's either the bear or your family, well, you better get on that bear and protect them with that natural instinct. That testosterone fueled crazy that if you haven't felt, you will when the right time comes, and it will flow naturally. The need to protect people you love makes you a man.

I don't blame the young on their lack of masculinity, I blame online dating, pornography, and video games. The three deadliest thing for young men. You're just hidden away masturbating to women you'll never meet, hoping to fuck, while wanting to fantasize about blowing peoples heads up. I could be getting older, just as the generation that is slowly dying after spending years judging guys like me, but I feel for these young men. They deserve the chance to fight, fuck, and have life beat the hell out of them. These are the building blocks of being a man, experience. If they don't get it, they're not going to be able to handle and love adult women, who by nature are the toughest animals in the kingdom, and that would be the fall of man as we know it.